PLOS ONE has published over 65,000 papers with a DAS in the three years since the open data policy was put in place. We were initially concerned we would not be able to consider a significant number of submissions because authors could not share data, but this did not turn out to be the case. Since the implementation of the updated policy, we estimate staff have rejected less than 0.1% of submissions due to authors’ unwillingness or inability to share data. What we have seen is a growing acceptance of data sharing and evolution of data sharing practices. For instance, there has been a steady growth in datasets available directly via public data repositories such as the NCBI databases, Figshare or Dryad. While the proportion of articles with a data availability statement linking to one of these repositories is still relatively low, at around 20% in 2016, the growth is encouraging.

Another 60% of articles include data in the main text and supplementary information. While we strongly recommend discipline-specific open repositories where they exist, we also deposit the supporting information files, figures, and tables included with every article to Figshare and give each of these its own DOI. Thus, in addition to being available via the PLOS ONE article, this content is also available through an external data repository. The remaining 20% of papers have data available upon request due to restrictions acceptable under our policy, including restrictions related to sensitive data or because the data are owned by and available from a third party.